Campus Notebook: Dance, walk like a zombie through Troy

Published 5:01 pm, Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Here's a unique way to get college kids out of their ivory towers and into their new community.

College kids are notorious for holing up on campus and having little interaction with the people and businesses in their new hometowns. Troy's Business Improvement District will attempt to turn that around by inviting the city's college students on a Zombie Walk.

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This is certainly a healthier approach than Albany's zombie mob, which appears every weekend in the Quail Street and Western Avenue corridor. That's where stupefied, and drunken college students stagger around gorging on pizza and crappy beer until dawn.

The school is converting into an "all-Steinway school," which means that 90 percent or more of its acoustic pianos must be built or designed by Steinway and placed in the performance spaces, piano teaching studios, practice rooms and classrooms. Steinway, most experts say, makes some of the world's best pianos. The company's instruments grace many of the famous recital halls throughout the globe. You've heard one before because most major classical and jazz musicians have recorded on one.

Steinways typically cost well into the five and six figures.

It will take about five years to achieve the official designation. The school will be one of about 140 colleges, universities and conservatories worldwide with the designation, including the Oberlin Conservatory, Curtis Institute and Yale School of Music. Saint Rose had 300 undergraduate and graduate students and music minors in 2011. All music students must practice the piano for an hour a day.

"Becoming an all-Steinway school is the highest level of commitment to excellence and the future that a college can make to its music students and faculty, and it's our way of showing that Saint Rose embraces the utmost in quality," Saint Rose President David Szczerbacki said in a statement.

In the Afterschool STEM Mentoring Program, middle school students from high-needs districts will be mentored by SUNY graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The money will be used to recruit mentors and to create a new credit-bearing course designed by Empire State College.

It is based on a program already in place in New York City, but can be tweaked to fit the needs of each location.